


When My Time Comes Around

by plume_bob



Series: I'll Crawl Home To Her [1]
Category: Homeland
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, and the hurt is quinn, post 5.11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 23:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5435006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plume_bob/pseuds/plume_bob
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How’s he been?”</p>
<p>“Oh, you know,” Sahar quips, because she thinks Carrie probably does.</p>
<p>“Doing everything in his power to get worse?”</p>
<p>“Thought he was gonna hit the surgical doctor at one point.”</p>
<p>They have had quite an afternoon with Peter Quinn, that’s for sure. It’s getting dark now, turning to evening, but that hasn’t made him any more inclined to take painkillers or sleep. Any less inclined to watch the news and use every attending staff member’s phone he can beg, borrow or steal to bother Mr. Berenson and scroll the entire kingdom of social media.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When My Time Comes Around

**Author's Note:**

> A little outsider POV fic, because I really love them and never get enough of people observing the nature of Carrie and Quinn's relationship.
> 
> I watched the promo but, for the most part, didn't stick to it. Obviously, Quinn's recovery could never be this speedy or clean, and I condensed the time-frame waaay down, so... artistic license?

He swims smoothly in and out of unconsciousness, but then he wakes up for real, vitals strong.

The first word out of his mouth is,

“Carrie.”

Sahar’s go something like, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, you’re okay,” and a bunch of other soothing nonsense. She holds his arm, his forehead, and she calls for a doctor.

And while they wait, he says it again but like a question this time. “Carrie?”

The blonde, the one who did a frankly unnerving job of bringing this man, Peter Quinn, out of his coma using her voice as a ladder.

It’s not like Sahar hasn’t seen stuff like that in her decade as a nurse, it was just—yeah. A little unlikely and romantic, maybe. Movie-like.

“She’s not here but she’ll be back.”

“I have to tell her,” Peter Quinn gasps, a shudder, “I gotta—it’s Berlin Central Station.”

She’s received the strictest instructions to report whatever he says to Doctor Brady immediately. She also watched the BSA get evacuated an hour ago on the news, checking her Facebook feed the entire time.

“Where the _hell_ is Doctor Brady?” Sahar screeches over her shoulder, and then back to Peter, who is rattling on his own breath, “Try not to panic breathe, okay? You’re doing great.”

The doc swings around the doorframe, pitching into the room off-kilter with his phone pressed to his ear, “Mr. Berenson?”

They relay the necessary information, but the doc’s face does something weird as he multitasks Peter’s situation, checking the machines.

Sahar waits for him to hang up. “What, what’s the matter?”

The doc gives her that look, that _wish you’d mind your own fucking business_ look that means nothing because he’s the biggest gossip on the ward bar none.

“The station. They already knew.”

Peter seems to sigh but Sahar steps back in a daze. She thumbs her engagement ring pulls out her own phone with numb hands. She doesn’t know a single person who should be there right now but knowing that doesn’t help.

She messages Amelia: _please tell me you’re still at home baby x_

The airport warning was early and absolute, but the station—

Peter’s voice is scratchy when he asks, “Was I late to the party?”

“Seems we all were,” she says, frowning, because Amelia is home and she wants to know why the desperation, _is everything okay???_

“Put on the TV.”

Doctor Brady frowns. “I don’t know if that’s a good—”

Peter’s voice seems to fail him, “Just—please,” and that’s what changes the doc’s mind, Sahar supposes.

And then, suddenly and still staring down at her phone, she wishes it hadn’t.

She picks up the remote with her fingers clumsy and finds some news. Oh, and it’s everywhere. On-going, party barely getting started. World news picking up from local news picking up from social media picking up from frightened travellers. A total evacuation of the station, but—thousands still trapped inside. The BSA had been clear, the whole thing feeling like an empty threat in the wind, but this. It moves too fast for Sahar to keep track, and Peter’s lungs struggle, _Peter_ struggles.

“I wanna talk to Saul,” but Doctor Brady presses him gently back down.

“Peter, do you know what happened to you?”

He gives the doc a look, an _of course I fucking know what happened to me_ look. He was there for it, after all. Sahar shivers because—they all were.

“Then you’re aware of how at risk you still are right now.”

Sahar gives the doc an anxious glance. “It’s just a phone call.” She thinks, yeah, maybe she wants Peter to make that call, too. Grasping hopelessly for knowledge, willing it to become power.

Doctor Brady relents; the man of single-minded relentlessness, and boy has it been a bad day for him. _Those CIA pricks_ , he’d muttered over his coffee earlier, _they come in here almost murdering my patients—_

Sahar had mildly argued, because for what it was worth to those CIA pricks, Peter Quinn struck her as a man who’d be pissed off if they _hadn’t_ woken him up and almost killed him.

The blonde woman was something, though; Sahar’s old romantic heart is predictable to the last string, taking easy flight around such things.

Peter gets his phone call, hoarse as he is. Sahar brings him water and hovers close, as close as Doctor Brady, like they’re both trying to make some kind of point. What else can they do? Trapped between Peter and the TV, a second wave of terror.

“Saul?”

She can only hear one side, of course, but it’s alarming all the same.

“ _What_?” And then, “Fuck, Saul, she’s—” Silence. “How long? Fifteen-fucking-minutes—” And then he starts to cough, blood on his lips, horrible empty hacking sound so deep in him he sounds like a bag of broken parts.

The doc tries to snatch up the phone and for a second, Sahar thinks he’s gonna get hit right in the face. Hit right in the face by the guy they were both too stubborn to let die.

It’s almost comical.

She remembers the way Peter had dropped in that tank, and then it’s not comical at all. No, she’s just mildly hysterical. She’s in shock.

“I’m fine,” Peter tells Mr. Berenson down the line. Sahar almost believes it. If she shut her eyes, it might even be easy. “Let me know the second Carrie’s out.”

Peter swallows and nods; wincing, redundant. He’ll regret every movement he just made in around half an hour and Sahar will be pumping him back full of morphine. For now, though, he hands over the phone with a trembling hand.

“You’re lucky to be alive, Mr. Quinn.” Doctor Brady, using his most serious voice.

And Peter huffs like that’s some kind of joke. A cosmic one; tactical-clad SEK teams on the news, _thousands of people trapped—_

“A gunshot, infection, extensive bruising,” Sahar says lightly, as light as she can, _striving_ for it, and Peter looks at her. “Kidnapping, gassing.” She tries out a smile and thinks, _thinks_ , Peter’s bruised eyes soften. “I’d sure bet on you.”

The doc’s beeper goes off. Peter’s a priority patient but there’s little more to do right now than wait for his strength to come all back, and then re-examine the damage anew.

Sahar stays behind, though, checking, rechecking. She’s not surprised by his tenacity, his iron grip on life. The human body is astoundingly resilient and he’s living, sort-of-breathing proof.

“That the girl who was here, Carrie?” Sahar innocently asks, not looking at him, no pressure. If it sounds important when they just wake up, it usually puts a smile on their face at least.

Not with him. His heart monitor does most of the telling.

“Whatever made her leave seemed real important.”

That—doesn’t help. He’s scared, she realizes. That blip-blip-blip is pure fear.

“It is,” he rasps, almost thoughtlessly, almost _not_ to Sahar.

She could ask, and maybe he’d even give her something, a slip. But it’s needless; she’s merely looking for a scrap of light here, something to keep her warm when she heads back home after this cursed black day.

Carrie’s out there, is what Peter doesn’t really need to say. The reason Sahar doesn’t ask.

His Carrie is at the station, doing whatever it is those people do when shit hits the fan.

“Are your loved ones safe?” Peter asks; hell, she wasn’t expecting that one. He’s looking at her engagement ring refracting every which way under the lights.

“Yeah, they’re safe.” It’s hard to smile for the guilt. Amelia’s safe, Sahar’s family are safe, but plenty of people’s aren’t. “I’m sure—yours will be.” Peter rolls his head a little on the pillow, a shoulder too. “Oh, I know that look.”

It’s the _need more painkillers_ look.

She steps back towards the trolley but Peter reaches out. “No, I wanna be lucid.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” she tells him, kind but firm. “You’ve been through enough, Peter, you can stand a little medicine.”

He shakes his head slowly. “No.”

“If Mr. Berenson calls—”

“I’ll be sober enough to answer it,” Peter hoarsely sasses the shit out of her.

Sahar rolls her eyes, thinks _CIA pricks_ but a little fond this time. “Give me something to do. I hate standing around with my thumb up my ass while the world goes to hell.”

He huffs, looking himself over. “You and me both.” It’s intensely sad, the expression he pulls. Maybe he’s just too exhausted to guard it.

Sahar doesn’t know what job he does, exactly, but _penetrated a terrorist cell_ is—yeah. His future, she guesses, is uncertain.

“Not that the world isn’t always going to hell somewhere,” she goes on, leafing through his chart. “Can’t be everywhere at once now, can we?”

He watches, pointlessly, as the media blackout forces a planet’s worth of reporters into an endless cycle of old footage and meandering guesswork. Sahar can’t calm herself, twitchy on her feet, feeling aimless. She doesn’t want to look at the TV, and Peter doesn’t say a word. It’s like having a roving itch.

“I’ll leave you to rest, then.”

She doesn’t think for a second he will.

She hopes Mr. Berenson calls back with good news. Maybe they’ll contain the attack, foil it, catch the bastards, but Sahar thinks that’s not the exact news Peter’s waiting for.

 

~

 

And then, somehow, it’s over.

 

~

 

_Carrie_.

That’s her, running up the hallway right now like there should be music swelling over her.

She’s worse for wear, even from a distance. Looks like she’s been in some kind of fight. Chariots of Fire, Sahar thinks hysterically, both too tired and in too good a mood; giddily, _breathlessly_ relieved.

Carrie slows to a quick walk, and Sahar comes out ahead of her, telling her, “Along this way,” because they’ve moved Peter, now.

They march up the hall, past the nurse’s station with the TV blaring perpetual.

“You got here fast,” Sahar comments, because what’s reporting is that the attack has only just been stopped; the dust hasn’t even begun to settle.

Carrie nods jerkily, swallowing and breathing hard. Like she ran all the damn way here, or something.

“How’s he been?”

“Oh, you know,” Sahar quips, because she thinks Carrie probably does.

“Doing everything in his power to get worse?”

“Thought he was gonna hit the surgical doctor at one point.”

They have had quite an afternoon with Peter Quinn, that’s for sure. It’s getting dark now, turning to evening, but that hasn’t made him any more inclined to take painkillers or sleep. Any less inclined to watch the news and use every attending staff member’s phone he can beg, borrow or steal to bother Mr. Berenson and scroll the entire kingdom of social media.

Sahar rounds the corner to his room as he’s giving Jess the pout and the eyebrow.

“Peter, you _can’t_ —”

“You can’t tell this one what he can and can’t, Jessie,” Sahar says, making them both startle. She feels Carrie come in behind her, the warmth of her burning there. “I’ve been trying all damn day.”

A kind of exchange happens. Jess spots Carrie, at this point infamous as the blonde coma enchanter, and trails across the room as Carrie does the same in the opposite direction.

Jess touches Sahar’s arm, giving her a look.

Sahar shakes her head. “We can’t both stop to ogle, I’ll tell you all about it later.”

“Why do _you_ get to stay?”

“Because I’ve put up with him the longest,” Sahar hisses.

She’ll pay for it later, most likely, but fuck it. Sahar isn’t leaving unless they start having sex on the hospital bed.

“Carrie.”

There it is. The first and foremost word. Sahar stays at the side of the room by the trolley, gloving up and prepping the morphine that she _thinks_ he might finally accept now.

“Hey.” Carrie’s voice takes on a whole other tone, sweeter than Sahar ever could’ve imagined. A chair scrapes across the floor and Carrie sits. She doesn’t touch him, just stares— _stares_ like he’s _unbelievable_ , a thing of her imagination. “How’re you feeling?”

He breathes a laugh. “As bad as I look, judging by your face.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Saul said—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“They were wrong about the airport.”

“ _Someone_ wanted it to happen.”

“Fuck.” And then, when Sahar has basically stopped moving at all with the IV bag in her hand, “It matters. You figured it out, it was _you_. I wanna know what happened.”

“Me too, Quinn,” Carrie says, heavy as hell. “I spoke with Hussein.” It means something, because Peter goes quiet and Carrie tells him, “It’s okay, it can wait. I know it matters but it can all wait.”

Sahar is loath to actually interrupt them in any way, to go anywhere near them like this when the air around the bed is so inwardly dense and outwardly unwelcoming.

“I’m sorry, guys,” she says sheepishly, approaching them slowly to hang the IV. It’s like pushing through the membrane of a bubble, every forward step.

At some point, she realizes with a little jump in her heart, Carrie has taken Peter’s hand. It’s so tiny in his, fingers curled over the curve of his own, resting on his ribs, and Sahar stares, jerks herself out of it, and catches Peter’s eye.

“It’s morphine time, Peter.”

He takes a very long, very difficult looking breath and nods. He got real dizzy about an hour ago. All this careful breathing he’s been doing to avoid the pain has made his hypoxia worse. Sahar had gotten the terrible feeling, then, that he’s good at finding ways to limit prolonged personal discomfort.

“You’ve been refusing—” Carrie starts, knuckles going white. “Of course you have. Fucking hell, Quinn.”

He gives her a look that makes her sigh. It’s funny, and it appeals to the old theater kid in Sahar, how he can get so much across with a single expression.

Carrie relents, shaking her head, sharing something _known_ and familiar with him, their history in a lingering glance.

“I’ll get out of you guys’ way,” she says, and Carrie manages to pull her focus from Peter long enough to give Sahar a smile so fragile and earnest, a real gem of a thing. “Peter, if you need—”

Peter, the man who’s voice box is fried, finishes her sentence. “—anything, just beep. I got it the first dozen times.”

She grins helplessly and shakes her head at him; CIA prick. When he’s all better, he’ll be handsome as hell, she grudgingly acknowledges. Sahar wonders if that’s why the jihadists chose him, to be all blue-eyed and photogenic for the news. Maybe it was their criticism of Eurocentric beauty standards—God, what the fuck is she on about.

She is _too tired_ for this.

Sahar’s halfway to the door when Peter starts talking again, very quiet and drawling out, morphine-lazy.

“You back in now, then?”

“I don’t even know what I am.”

“You’re glowing, Carrie, come on.”

“It’s fear sweat,” Carrie quips. “It’s an afraid-for-my-life, getting-my-ass-kicked glow.”

“I should’ve been there.”

“In your condition—”

“No, all along.”

Sahar stands with her back to the wall beside the door. It’s so beneath her, this eavesdropping crap, but she kicked Jessie out and it’s only fair she gets a story to tell the girls in the break room. The story they’ve all been wondering about since Peter Quinn woke up at the command of Carrie’s voice. She muses whether if this makes her a spier of spies.

“You did your job, Quinn.”

“My _job_.” He snorts. “Nothing I did helped.”

“Helped me.” The sound of Carrie’s breath gets louder, more uneven. “Scared the shit out of me, but you did, you helped.” Her voice breaks apart. “I can’t—can’t believe you’re alive. On the news, you— _God_.”

Gentle, so gentle, “Carrie, hey, stop it,” and Sahar can’t hear any more of this, it is suddenly not okay, what she’s doing. She can’t hear Peter say Carrie’s name again, in that coup de grace way he does every time.

She’d be a terribly spy.

Sahar walks on wobbly legs down the hall, leaning against the nurse’s station. She’s getting slapped in the face over and over again by all the _what-ifs_. The news anchor talking about the brave SEK teams and the luck of Berlin seems unreal when back in Peter’s room, talking in the hushed voices of the lovesick and grief stricken, is a woman who figured it out and a man who was not so lucky.

She wonders if history will ever know their names.

Lena asks her, “What’s up?” over a clipboard and Sahar couldn’t put it into words, not after this day. Not even a day, a single fucking shift.

She thumbs her engagement ring. “I just can’t wait to get home, that’s all.”

“You and me both, sister.”

That’s just what Peter said. Sahar finds it in her, somewhere, to laugh.

“They okay in there?” Lena asks, gruff voice rich with curiosity.

“They’re—something, alright.”

“Her too, huh?”

Sahar’s smile turns into a chuckle. That about sums it up, yeah.

Carrie stays in her chair until Peter is well and truly sleeping and, as Sahar grabs her coat to head home, probably will be there way beyond.

On her way out, Sahar hands her a hot coffee from the good machine upstairs.

“Thank you,” Carrie tells her tiredly, still scratched up, still bruised. “For everything.”

They make a pair, they do. On the bed, Peter’s hand is upturned in the sheets and Carrie’s is still there, fingertips drawing absent patterns along his palm, up the gentle curl of his fingers.

“Hey, don’t mention it.”

“Goodnight, Sahar.”

Carrie’s face, the calm cadence of her voice, the way she’s pulled herself so admirably and single-mindedly together, quiets the last of Sahar’s anxieties, leaving her to go home to Amelia with a heart lightened after all.

For that, she is equally as grateful.

 


End file.
